As columnist Leonard Pitts so eloquently writes on today’s Viewpoints page, the African-American experience is personal and yet communal, something Martin Luther King Jr. so richly understood.
King, whose birthday we celebrate today, saw the struggle from slavery to freedom as a passage from bondage to the Promised Land. Slavery wasn’t an excuse for the disadvantages that generations of African-Americans faced. Instead, the existence of slavery and, later, of hostile Jim Crow laws were the reasons King persevered.
Virtually no one would question that African-Americans today are far better off than in the overtly racist climates of earlier decades, when opportunities and hopes were violently quashed. Today’s “black America” bears no resemblance to that term’s meaning when the evils of segregation set its boundaries. And not so long from now will come a time when most African-Americans have no direct experience with Jim Crow racism and its poisons. That’s not to say that progress remains relative and quite uneven.
“Black America” today consists of more separate stories than communal experiences, a defining theme that Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson explores in his new book, Disintegration: the Splintering of Black America. This, notes Robinson, is the ironic conflict between “the absolute belief in Dr. King’s dream that all be judged solely by the content of their character, (and) the other, a fierce determination that African-American history and culture be not only revered but also perpetuated.”
Often, this conflict has represented a pyrrhic tradeoff in the years since King’s assassination — incomplete progress and new struggles over racial identity, expectations, solutions and even language. “Increasingly between the abandoned and the rest of black America,” writes Robinson, “there is failure to communicate, much less comprehend.” And as such, he continues, “it is inconceivable that the president of the United States could see himself, or have others see him as a ‘black leader.’”
On this day set aside to honor the civil rights leader, one can’t help but wonder how Dr. King would have addressed the complex reality of a much larger mainstream middle class, a disturbingly large abandoned and dysfunctional underclass, a powerful and wealthy black elite, and those of mixed race, who, like the president himself, are becoming a larger, more visible part of American culture.
Remembering the past, and collectively transcending it as our nation grapples with its challenges, is perhaps the most appropriate way to pay tribute to the righteous trek that King pursued with unparalleled energy and purpose.